We are all individuals… bioinformatics in the personalized medicine era

Abstract

The medical landscape is evolving at a rapid pace, creating the opportunity for more personalized patient treatment and shifting the way healthcare is approached and thought about. With the availability of (epi)genome-wide, transcriptomic and proteogenomic profiling techniques detailed characterization of a disease at the level of the individual is now possible, offering the opportunity for truly tailored approaches for treatment and patient care. While improvements are still expected, the techniques and the basic analytical tools have reached a state that these can be efficiently deployed in both routine research and clinical practice. Still, some major challenges remain. Notably, holistic approaches, integrating data from several sources, e.g. genomic and epigenomic, will increase the understanding of the underlying biological concepts and provide insight into the causes, effects and effective solutions. However, creating and validating such a knowledge base, potentially for different levels of expertise, and integrating several data points into meaningful information is not trivial.